12 May 2026
Glenn
Welcome to another edition of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting things done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson. I’m a wildlife conservation biology student. I’m also a member of the Labor Party and LEAN.
Janaline
My name’s Janaline. I’m also a member of the Labor Party, former diplomat, current climate and environment and anti-racism activist.
I’d like to acknowledge that all of us today are recording on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia, and we would like to pay our respects to their elders past and present, and to any First Nations listeners that we have.
Glenn
Thanks very much, Janaline. Well, the big dog in the room this week is the budget that’s coming up next Tuesday. So all talk is about what the government is going to be spending all of our hard earned tax money on. It’s generally a time when it does focus people’s attention on who’s getting what, and whether it’s fair and whether it’s the right thing. But it’s also a time where people focus on the debt. The government is spending more money than it raises. In the last financial year, it raised somewhere like, or it spent rather, somewhere around $785 billion, yet it only collected about $750 billion. So there’s a gap there. So my first question, Janaline, is why can’t the government do what every household in Australia has to do and live within its budget.
Janaline
Every household in Australia doesn’t necessarily have a surplus in its budget. I mean, households with mortgages have often quite considerable debts. But I think the bigger point is that government debt is not the same as household debt. I mean, this is one of the things that conservative politicians, at least since John Howard in my living memory, keep making, that households have to balance their budgets. Why can’t the government balance its budget? Well, the government is not the same as a household. The government has to provide goods and services to all of its people. It has to act in the national interest. And it also has the capacity to deal with debt in a different way to households. Firstly, government borrowing rates are much lower than household borrowing rates. Government’s capacity to increase revenue is not the same as you showing up to a job and having a fixed salary. So I think it is kind of a misleading analogy.
Government debt is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the economic circumstances. It depends on what that debt is funding and it depends on what the government’s forward economic plans are. So, I mean, during COVID, we ran up massive deficits because we needed to put money into the economy to stop it from collapsing and to stop people from basically having no income, no services and a terrible life.
I think just saying simplistically that the government should always run surpluses is unfair. The second thing I’d say is that this Labor government has actually delivered more surpluses than deficits since it came into power four years ago. This is the 4th budget and the Treasurer has intimated that he’s expecting to have another budget surplus. This will be three out of four. So I think it is not true to say that there is enormous profligacy here.
And the final point I’d make is that if government debt is funding investment, and by investment I mean things like infrastructure, I mean things like health and education that will assist the nation to become more productive and help its people to be smarter and more able and healthier in the future, then that is not necessarily a bad use of taxpayer funds.
So I think the important thing is that the government has a plan to get back into surplus and to pay down some of the debt, that the expenditure is in investment and not just in recurrent spending.
So for example, John Howard was, you know, famous for running a bunch of surpluses because of the mining boom, but he spent it basically on tax giveaways and, you know, incredibly generous superannuation concessions for wealthy people and things like capital gains tax concessions that this current government is now talking about winding back because it is so grossly contributing to intergenerational inequity.
So I think it’s about what the government is spending on as to whether any given government deficit is a good or a bad idea for the economy and for the people.
Glenn
Okay, thank you for that. Well, you mentioned it’s about what the government is spending it on. So let’s have a little bit of a look at what the government is spending the money on. So the biggest single ticket item in the government budget is social security. So that covers everything from age pensions to the cost of aged care to the national disability insurance scheme, job seeker allowances, family payments or whatever. And that’s more than a third of the budget just on its own. I think it’s around about 35-36%. The government’s looking at making some savings in the NDIS. Why can’t they make savings across all those other categories under social security as well and help bring the deficit down.
Janaline
Well, I reckon they’re trying. I mean, I think they’ve made some reforms to the way in which aged care is delivered to try and save some money, or at least to make it more efficient, because it is a growing sector. We have an ageing population. There is significantly more demand for those services than there was 30 or 40 years ago. And so I think the government needs to constantly look at ways of making those services and the delivery of those services more effective, more targeted and more efficient right? Because clearly you need to have aged care services. I mean, in a country as rich as Australia, it would be unconscionable not to support people to age with dignity.
I think that is just a sort of fundamental human right and value. And it’s certainly a fundamental Labor value. So, I don’t think you can just cut those things. I think you can look at how they’re being delivered and make sure that you’re plugging opportunities for rort, that you’re making sure that services are designed to be delivered in a way that actually targets the need.
And that’s one of the things that they’re looking at in the NDIS to have essentially support tailored to need rather than just to the diagnosis of a particular condition. And that was always what the NDIS was intended to do.
So I think they are trying to do that. I think, you know, you can never do enough, right? Because as soon as you do one reform and you fix one problem, another one is going to emerge, partly because, you know, people are very creative about getting their hands on government money. And I’m not talking about aged care recipients or people with a disability here. I’m talking about providers and, you know, fraudsters who take advantage of the system to rort it to the detriment and to the cost of the people who actually need it and who actually deserve it.
So I think it’s really important to, you know, keep a handle on how these things are being delivered and to make sure that the services and the expenditure is being well targeted to the purpose of that expenditure and to helping the people that really need the help.
Glenn
You’ve raised a couple of important points there and there are two main themes, I think, and the first one’s about being more effective in how these things are targeted. So I know within the aged care sector, there’s been a bigger emphasis in recent years on supporting people to age at home rather than them moving prematurely into aged care facilities, which cost a lot more to run, you’ve got a lot more staff and a lot more care when people don’t necessarily need all of that. If they just need somebody to come around and clean their house or help them have a shower or give them meals or whatever, that can be done a lot more cheaply to the taxpayer while letting the aged person have the dignity of living in their own home for as long as possible, then only moving to aged care when they just can’t survive in the home on their own anymore.
And then, of course, the other changes that are happening now with the NDIS, as you mentioned, talking about targeting that more on the basis of actual need rather than just diagnosis, because it’s a very simple matter for a friendly doctor to give a particular diagnosis that then unlocks a Pandora’s box of riches, and often for fraudsters and people who are selling snake oil to the less fortunate members of our community that needs to be tightened up. It’s a challenging problem, but it’s not an insurmountable one, and it’s a good thing that the government’s having a go at doing that.
The other aspect of that social security spend is the JobSeeker and particularly the family payments allowance. Now, I would note that, say, the United States, for example, their budget spend is around about one-fifth, so around about 20 to 25%, ours are sort of 25 to 30%, because they put more emphasis on individuals taking care of themselves. And in fact, the idea that the state would pay for somebody’s medical bills rather than the individual themselves is anathema to them. Why can’t we be more like them and save the budget money that way?
Janaline
Well, because we don’t want to end up with their health outcomes and their horrible inequality and a situation where people literally die in the street in front of hospitals because they can’t pay for a bill. Or people will have one catastrophic illness or one catastrophic accident, and then the family is plunged into poverty for the next three generations because they can’t afford $100,000 for that operation. I don’t think we want to be that country.
So if you look at most European countries, they spend considerably more as a proportion of their GDP on public services and they have better public services. I reckon it would be a terrible idea to move from a current very, very strong, I think, social licence that says the government looks after vulnerable people and that healthcare and education are public goods.
It’s not just good for you as an individual that you can get treatment under Medicare. It is also good for the society, because it means that you will get the treatment, you will get the treatment to a reasonable standard, you will probably get better and then you can go and work, and you can contribute and you can be a productive member of society.
There are so many people in the US who are just not able to be productive members of society because they have chronic medical conditions that they cannot afford to fix, that are perfectly fixable, but they cannot afford it. And then you’ve got a class of people in the United States who can afford extraordinary medical interventions and who have ridiculous amounts of money.
I don’t think the Australian people are up for that level of inequality. I mean, one of the biggest debates in this current budget is about intergenerational equity. And it’s about concerns about growing inequality in Australia. I think, you know, there is a very, very widespread support in Australia for not having those levels of inequality that are basically driven by people not having public services.
Glenn
So the health part of the budget is around about 15 to 16 percent of the total budget. So it’s not as big as the, it’s nowhere near as big as the social security benefits that we were talking about before with the pensions and the NDIS and the family payments, but it’s still a big amount. Medicare, the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, and the public hospitals in particular, and mental health support are sort of the big ticket items under that budget. But there’s still waiting lists, waiting times at public hospitals and waiting times in emergency sections. Why can’t the government pour more money into that so that you don’t have to wait at the emergency section or the ED if you’ve got a particular issue or if you need a non-life threatening operation done, you know, hip replacements, knee replacements, that sort of thing. Why can’t the government just fix those things by putting in the money that it requires?
Janaline
Well, I mean, budgets are about choices, right? And, you know, you raise the issue of the deficit and the debt. You’ve got to make choices. How big a debt and how big a deficit are you willing to tolerate in order to have those medical services? And the other issue with just pouring more money into health is, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t put more money into health, right? But I think how it’s delivered and how you make sure it is delivered in the most effective way to deliver the actual outcomes to the people who really need it is so important.
I think we could do with more investment in health, but in order to do that, we need to raise more revenue. I don’t think it makes any sense to cut other parts of the budget to fund Medicare. I think we need to actually have some quite serious conversations about how much tax or how much revenue the government is raising to enable it to do more of that expenditure. And this is, you know, the point that I made last time, like people talk about, you know, government taxes and government revenue in a kind of rhetorical frame that is completely divorced from the reason that governments raise revenue, which is to deliver these services.
Glenn
You mentioned talking about the targeting and efficiency of spending, and I know the government has spent a lot of resources developing nurse-led walk-in centres and fully bulk-billed GP clinics. How does that help spend the health dollar better?
Janaline
Well, I think it makes it more efficient at dealing with those smaller health conditions that if treated expeditiously and at the lowest level of expertise and therefore the cheapest level of expertise available, as in advance practice nurses rather than very expensive doctors, then you actually deal with those issues and you don’t let them develop into more serious problems. I mean, one of the issues going back to the US is that because people can’t afford to get small things treated, those small things end up being huge things. And then they end up in emergency departments and unable to work and incapacitated and sucking up massive public resources. I mean, it just, it doesn’t make any sense.
So I think having these walk-in clinics, even though they’re also available to people who can afford to pay for private health care, it’s just more expeditious. So in terms of administering it, it’s very, very simple. And you just deal expeditiously with small issues that then hopefully don’t become bigger issues.
Glenn
So just to round out that point, why can’t the government make sure that only those people who really need it and who can’t afford to pay for it themselves get that free walk-in centre treatment or bulk billed at their GP?
Janaline
Well, I mean, they have in the past had sort of bulk billing for people with health care cards, which goes some way. But I think there’s also a recognition that even people who don’t have incomes low enough to qualify for health care cards still might actually need some support to go to the doctor. And these are working people. They’re probably on middle incomes. But, you know, during COVID, there was a plethora of stories of people who couldn’t afford to go to the doctor and who didn’t. And that is an impost on future public health, and it is an impost on productivity, and it is an impost on the economy eventually. So, you know, means testing is a great idea, but if it can’t be done efficiently and easily and cheaply, then it’s actually often better not to have means testing and just accept that public health is a public good.
I mean, it’s like public schools. Public schools are open to everybody, regardless of your income. And they should be, in my view, because I think it is actually really good for society for kids to go to public schools. And I think it’s actually, frankly, really good for rich kids to be going to public schools with poorer kids because it actually stops the kind of atomization of society. So I think it’s about setting aside, you know, this sort of politics of envy kind of argument that says, oh, if you can afford it, you should pay for it privately and actually accept that some things are actually good for the whole of society.
Glenn
Thanks, Janaline. We’ll move on to education in a moment, but I wanted to hear Luke’s perspective on the health issue.
Luke
I just wanted to second what you just said, Janaline, about healthcare spending. It really is an argument of efficiency as well. You know, things like the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, the fact that we even negotiate with the people that sell us the drugs and the Americans don’t, just means we get a better deal. And that’s even before the subsidies kick in. Or, you know, things like the National Immunisation Program, you know, the fact that Australia has become one of the countries that has, or almost has, completely eliminated HPV. The cost of treating those diseases particularly in their late stages, far outweighs the cost of things like immunisation or early intervention, particularly with things like breast cancer screening programs or bowel cancer screening programs. It really is a matter of efficiency. I mean, you just draw a comparison between the Americans, how much they spend on healthcare. I think it’s around $14,000 USD per capita that is spent on an individual’s healthcare. In Australia, it’s only about 7,000. That is obviously public money mostly, but even if it is public money, that is so much less money that we get to keep because we are preventing those late stage diseases that a lot of countries, particularly America with their private healthcare system, have problems with, because it’s a way to extract profit from treating the symptoms of a disease rather than preventing it from happening in the first place.
Janaline
And that’s not even taking into account the productivity loss from those people not being able to work or not being able to work to the productive level that they otherwise would be able to. I think public healthcare is a massive social benefit.
Glenn
Between health and social security, we’ve accounted for about 50% of the budget expenditure. The whole care economy is probably a topic for another day, because that’s a big enough topic to talk about in itself. And we started to range into education there before. Education is still one of the big ticket items, not as big as the others. It accounts for about 7% of the budget. And that covers federal government funding for public schools, which go through the states, TAFE colleges, universities, and then student support in the form of HECS. Now, I was fortunate to be of a generation that went through university before HECS was a thing. Thank you, Gough Whitlam. Luke is not so fortunate, born at the wrong time. Why can’t we go back to a system that allows people to attend university without accruing a big debt?
Janaline
I think HECS is a brilliant scheme. I think you can argue about the levels, but I think the idea that the government pays up front for your education and then you pay it back as you become able to pay it back at a fixed level is very, very smart, because what it means is that instead of only being able to make university education available to a very few lucky people, and Glenn, I think when you went to university, the rates of attendance at university were actually really, really low, they were probably around, I don’t know, what, 10%, maybe 15%? I think now they are considerably higher. And the reason they are able to be higher is because of HECS. So I mean, one of the things that, you know, global studies have found is that delivery of primary education, the benefits of investment in primary education flow very significantly to society and much less to the individual. That decreases, that balance shifts as your level of education rises. So for secondary education, I think, you know, there is a certain benefit to society. There is also quite a significant benefit to the individual in terms of the kinds of jobs that they can then take. When you get to university, there is a very, very strong benefit to the individual. And there is still a benefit to society because societies benefit from having well-educated, smart people who can, you know, go off and invent things or, you know, do clever things.
But there is also a very strong benefit to the individual, so given that going to university significantly increases your earning capacity, I think it is very reasonable to say when you start actually earning beyond a certain amount, you start paying it back. And the way that HECS is structured is that you start paying it back when you reach a kind of middle income threshold, and then you pay it back as a fixed percentage of that income. Now, I think the recent changes to the way in which HECS is calculated and the recent changes in the way in which financial institutions are allowed to consider HECS have made it better. But I think fundamentally the principle that you start paying it back when you can afford to and at a level at which it should be affordable is actually the reason that we can have so many more people going to university.
A friend of mine did his honours thesis in economics many, many years ago on comparing free university education to university education under HECS. And the data showed that in the free university education, the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries were middle class kids. They were people whose parents could have afforded to pay those fees because they were the ones who were able to get through school, who didn’t have to drop out at 15 to go and get a job to support the family and who got a significant benefit in terms of future earning opportunities. Under HECS, that demographic significantly equalized. There were many, many more lower socioeconomic kids who were able to get access to university because of the additional places that were made available because people started paying back for their education.
Glenn
Okay, that’s a very cogent and coherent argument for HECS, Janaline, well supported by the data. Luke, HECS is your lived reality. What’s the view of you and your peers to that very persuasive argument that Janaline has just given us?
Luke
A lot of my friends are in the STEM space, so we’re not victims of the Jobs Ready Graduate Scheme, which is causing all the people in arts to have their costs absolutely balloon. I think the government’s pledged to do something about it, but, you know, of course that hasn’t eventuated yet.
But just getting to uni in the first place is such a challenge, particularly with a lot of the courses that people want to do. If you want a degree from a more employable institution, you’re going to need better marks. And a lot of the people, you know, need strong background, strong motivations to come through. I do see an argument for it being free, or at least the cost being heavily reduced. I believe HECS was a lot cheaper when it first started out.
Janaline
I’m not going to defend the Jobs Ready Graduate Scheme. I think that was a terrible idea and I really don’t understand why this Labor government has not repealed it as they said they would. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
I guess my defence of HECS is a defence of the principle. It’s not necessarily a defence of the particulars of how it’s been implemented. I do think that universities should be better funded, to be honest. I think if we’re talking about increasing bits of the budget and raising funds to do that, I think actually properly funding universities and moving back away from this sort of terrible corporatised model of university governance would be a very good thing for the country and for the universities. I think it is absolutely obscene that Australian universities have this whole cadre of extremely highly paid executives who do things like run around drumming up fundraising instead of actually focusing on research and teaching, which is what I think universities should be focused on.
It all kind of started because of this idea that universities should be made to pay their own way a lot more. And I think that was fundamentally flawed because I think, again, universities provide a public good. I think blue sky research in random things is a public good and I think the public should pay for it.
I also think that the whole university model in Australia needs to be seriously reformed, including the reliance on international students. I mean, I don’t have a problem with Australia making its tertiary education available to international students. I do have a problem with the idea that universities now depend on international students to function. I think that is a misallocation of public funds. So I think there’s a lot of issues with the way in which education is delivered, but I do also think that education is a public good.
Glenn
In that little exchange, Janaline, you mentioned blue sky research and Luke, you mentioned STEM. Are we spending enough on science or why can’t we give a lot more focus to expenditure on science and scientific research, whether it’s at that basic level or at the applied level?
Luke
I’d like to acknowledge that there’s been some pretty good strides recently. I think the money that was used to renew the state of the CSIRO was really important. And of course, the money that was spent on the Antarctic icebreaker, I think the RSV Nuyina, you know, all those sorts of things are fantastic and they’re great. But the sort of trap that I believe is the sort of charter that they have of commercialization and being able to create a productivity gain. That fits very well into the Future Made in Australia agenda, where we need to be engaging in a lot of research and development for new technologies that eventually will sustain our economy in some way. But there’s a big part that’s sort of missing from that. You know, a lot of the blue sky research that has been done, particularly, you know, in mathematics, a lot of the things that we value now, all of the way all of our computers function and the backbone of computer science is built on mathematicians toying around 100 years ago with blue sky research because they think, oh, that’ll be interesting and we need those values now.
So the very idea that blue sky research might not achieve something or it could achieve something, but it might not be useful, I think is flawed because there’s a lot it can achieve and there’s a lot we don’t know. The CSIRO has a ginormous job. They are responsible for a ginormous amount of climate research. They do all of our environmental research, including the species recovery plans, which are completely outdated. There’s not enough money to go around because these studies are really expensive.
There’s so many things we don’t know about that area, that if we are not engaging in, it is a risk not only to the species which inhabit our continent, but it is also a risk because other countries are sweeping up those brilliant minds and putting it to use where they are.
It would be a great idea for an uplift in money, particularly in blue sky research and changing the charter of the CSIRO, which could enable it to have a little bit more freedom in how it does research, particularly with the weight of the task that it has been given, is really important.
Janaline
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think it is so short-sighted to say that publicly funded research needs to deliver some sort of commercial outcome or some sort of, you know, monetizable technological advance. I think the whole point of publicly funded research should be to give people the freedom to just look into stuff.
And I would make a pitch not just for funding, you know, scientific endeavors. I mean, I say this as an arts graduate. There is a huge amount of value in the arts. There is a huge amount of value in understanding history and geography and how people think and new ways of looking at things and new ways of looking at the world.
So, you know, I don’t think this sort of obsession with STEM is so science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be supported, but I’m saying it shouldn’t be supported at the expense of the humanities because the humanities actually, you know, clue’s in the name. It’s actually about how we get along as people. It’s about making us better people. It’s about moral clarity. I mean, I feel like if some people in certain governments had better philosophical training, they might not be doing some of the things they’re doing now. And certainly if they’d had some more training in history.
Glenn
All right, so as luck would have it, just having ranged across history, geography and science, that provides a perfect launching pad for the next big budgetary expenditure item, and that’s defence. Now we spend about 7% of the budget on defence. Part of that goes towards paying the personnel, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force personnel and all of the people around them that support that defence endeavour. And the other part is equipment, including US-made nuclear submarines. So at the moment we’re spending about 7% of the budget on defence that will probably or almost certainly go up. Why can’t we, given we are an island nation, why can’t we not spend that much money on defence and spend it more on things like science and education and those other things?
Luke
I don’t want to come out batting with that we should gut defence spending in order to pay for everything else. I think that’s sort of short-sighted Utopia, Wonderland thinking. But I think there are some pretty clear examples over the last decade where, particularly procurement, from the ADF has been stupid. I mean, I’m an outsider, obviously, but it seems to me that these ginormous cost blowouts and changes are just treated as, you know, the cost of doing business.
It looks like we’re buying gear that we don’t need, like purchases of 70 tonne Abrams tanks. What are you going to do with those in the ocean? You know, they don’t swim. Or buying things like Huntsman artillery with a range of about 60 kilometers. How’s that going to help us? Oh, you know, and that’s not even getting into the submarine debacle with, you know, the French and now the Americans. I think it’s important to acknowledge that when these procurements occur, we’re not buying, you know, oh, going, walking around Lockheed Martin, oh, I’ll take an F35, or I’ll have a strata tanker. These are ginormous research projects that require, often at times, a lot of domestic manufacturing as well, in order to produce these products.
So it’s important that we actually get something out of them and something of value that contributes to the Defence Force, because that is really important for budget efficiency so that we’re saving money so that we can spend it on things that are also important and not just throw it into a fire like we did with the French submarines.
Janaline
Yeah, I think the French submarines was a bit of a debacle. And that’s not to say that I think it was a bad idea to switch because I think there were… I think there were very good arguments for why those French submarines were not going to meet our needs into the future. But I agree with you, Luke. And I think one of the things that this government, to be fair, has tried to do in its defence strategic review and its procurement reviews is actually to identify those weaknesses and try and sort them out.
You know, they’re setting up this Defence Delivery Agency, which is supposed to be responsible for having oversight of that kind of spending and making sure that it does align with strategic priorities. So to Glenn’s question though, why can’t we just not spend so much on defence? I think we’re actually going to have to spend more on defence, even though we’re an island nation. I don’t think we’re at any kind of imminent risk of mainland invasion. Let me just be clear. But a country that wants to interfere with our national security doesn’t have to invade Australia to do that.
I mean, we have seen how Iran is basically destroying the global economy by stopping trade through a particular strait. And, you know, that is not in any way to reduce the culpability of the people who decided to bomb Iran in the first place, which led to Iran taking these actions. So plenty of culpability to go around there. But I think the idea that the only thing we need to defend against is some sort of hypothetical attack on the Australian mainland is actually fanciful and would be seriously bad for our national security, for our economic security.
I think recent events and recent statements from the White House have really laid bare the vulnerability of our reliance on the US alliance. Now, we can’t withdraw from that easily. And the reason we can’t withdraw from that easily is because we are so intertwined and have been increasingly over the last several decades.
And in fact, if we did try and extract ourselves out of it, we could spend more than 5% of GDP on defence and have conscription and still be less safe than we are within the US alliance because of the technological capabilities that it gives us that we just have no way of developing ourselves.
So I think what we need to do now is actually look at how we can ensure that our defence spending is very, very rigorously strategically aligned and how we can make the most of that spending to insure not only against threats against our interests from people who might actively want to interfere with our trade, but also the vulnerability that has been exposed from our biggest alliance partner.
So we need to look at ways of beefing up our capability, our local capability, our manufacturing capability, but also our alliances with other countries in the region. And, you know, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister and the Prime Minister have been very, very active running around the world, striking security agreements with all sorts of partners that we might not have considered as priorities in the past. And I think that is extremely important, but it’s not going to be cheap. And in fact, one of the things that I do think we need to think about in terms of revenue raising is the additional spending that we might have to commit to defence.
Glenn
All right, so that brings us to another sort of segue, I suppose. We’ve finished with defence, education, health and social security, and that accounts for about two-thirds of the budget all up, so around about 65, 66% of spending. And the other third is on all those other things, including public services, various departments and across the Commonwealth, the interest that we pay on debt, things on infrastructure and housing and industry and agriculture and whatever.
But in the interests of time, we’ll just narrow down now, I think, and have a little bit look at what’s, if you like, a companion to the defence effort. It’s one thing to have big guns and ships and planes and whatever to physically defend space or have a kinetic response, to use their jargon, and defending our seaways. And Janaline, you just touched on the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister wandering around the world, shaking hands and smiling and putting things in place, but they don’t do that on their own. There’s a whole network around that that’s doing the daily slog of building those relationships and making those connections. Are we doing enough there? I know that’s an area you want to talk about.
Janaline
Yeah, look, I think this government has really done a lot to revitalise our diplomacy. One of the reasons that I left the Australian foreign service was because I really felt that the previous Coalition government firstly, massively ran down our diplomatic service. I mean, the focus on this sort of hard power via defence as opposed to diplomacy, I think was very badly misplaced. I think national security is best assured when you have a solid, capable and credible defence force, but also an active, capable and skilled diplomatic corps. Because diplomacy is how you avoid fighting. And fighting is very costly in terms of personnel, in terms of money, in terms of reputation, in terms of effects on the economy and on civilians. And that’s not even going to the human cost of people who actually get hurt in the fighting.
So I do think that investment in diplomacy is worthwhile. Having said that, you know, there are also a myriad ways in which you can make those things more effective. I mean, one of the things that I would like to see consideration of in the public service is just a bit of a reining in of the extremely expensive Senior Executive Service in the Australian Public Service. I mean, the Senior Executive Service was invented in the 1990s with a view to creating an incentive for senior people to perform well. So the idea was that they were on contracts, they were not permanent, but also that they were to be skilled enough to be able to slot into jobs across the public service. That never happened. What happened was we got highly inflated packages for people who then became permanent, so you can’t sack them anymore, but who are also highly dependent on the minister of the day.
And, you know, this is how you end up with robo debt. This is how you end up with senior people second guessing their ministers because their extraordinarily generous packages are dependent on them pleasing their minister. So what does that do to an impartial public servant? Where is frank and fearless advice in that context? And the sums we’re talking about are pretty substantial. And this idea that, oh, but, you know, we need to be competitive with the private sector, I think is actually entirely false because most of these people can’t get equivalent jobs in the private sector. And, you know, I think it is a travesty that secretaries of departments are paid twice as much as their ministers, or more.
So I think significant savings could be had and probably significant efficiencies and potentially significant improvements in the culture of the public service could be had if we considered abolishing the senior executive service and just making people, regular public servants, on an escalating scale that ends at a point that gets paid no more than your minister.
Glenn
There was that move in the 90s to corporatise the public sector because there was a view that business operated much more efficiently. And as we’ve seen in the US, you bring in a businessman to run a government and it goes very well. But you did have that situation where, you know, the salaries went up, you go under short term contracts, you don’t have that permanency, you’re paid to tell the Minister what they want to hear, not what they should hear. And as you say, that fear of losing your job if you don’t comply.
And then of course at the lower levels, because each department was its own entity, you ended up with a pay scale across all the public sector that was no longer consistent. So there were some departments where at the same level you could be getting paid, you know, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 depending on your level, more than your counterpart in another agency, purely on the basis of bargaining power, not on the basis of expertise. And then of course we had the Morrison government, which famously saw that the public servants were there to deliver, not to advise, they had political advisors for that. So there is a scope for efficiencies in terms of how those services are delivered across all agencies.
Janaline
You can see how the former public servants have very strong views about these things.
Glenn
There were some public servants who could walk both sides of the fence, as it were, and maintain their integrity. Ken Henry was one, Dennis Richardson’s another, but they were few and far between to be able to provide confident and robust advice to the past and be trusted by both sides.
Janaline
Well, I think it’s actually a terrible system if you have to rely on individuals to be able to do that. I mean, that says to me there’s a systemic failure. You should have a system that actually incentivizes people to give frank and fearless advice and to faithfully implement what the government of the day wants to do, but also not to be afraid of telling them what they need to hear. And the current system, I don’t think, delivers that at all.
Glenn
Well, that’s been a fascinating discussion, but it’s brought us up to our time. I’m Glenn Davidson.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?